You Have My Permission to Ignore the Debates

By Stephen L. Carter -
Oct 4, 2012

I am writing this column while not
watching Wednesday’s presidential debate.

I can’t remember the last time I saw one. I miss most
speeches, too, whether by the candidates or their surrogates. I
catch up with the transcripts, but only when I have time for
reflection about what the candidates have said. Politics at its
best is about ideas, and the battle of ideas isn’t visual.

I must confess that I don’t get the excitement about the
debates. I have written before about my difficulties with the
format, and the silliness of trying to do the serious work of
democracy by demanding that candidates squeeze their answers to
challenging questions into two minutes - far less time than
high-school debaters are given.

Historians remind us that the claim of the importance of
the debates is largely mythical, that even the fabled John
Kennedy-Richard Nixon contest in 1960 probably had less effect
on the outcome of the election than we like to remember. Few
votes are changed. Few undecideds turn into decideds. Yet
millions watch.

Quite possibly the importance of the debates is due to
media hype. What social scientists call the “availability
heuristic” is our tendency to exaggerate the commonness or
importance of something simply because it is familiar to us.
Psychologists have known for years that repeated stories in the
news media about a particular type of event -- children being
kidnapped, for example -- tend to cause the public to think that
such episodes occur far more frequently than they actually do.

Self-Important

So perhaps we watch the debates because of the steady
drumroll telling us how important they are. And they are
important -- to the news media. They fit perfectly into the
world of politics as presented on television, in which the
candidates have little time to say anything, but the
commentators have as much time as they need.

Critics of what currently passes for debate often laud the
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. There the presenter had an
hour, the respondent 90 minutes, and the presenter an additional
half-hour to respond. Today’s audience, conditioned to the quick
rather than the deep, would never sit still for anything so
lengthy.

Or so we are told. It’s important to remember how the
Lincoln-Douglas debates came about: Both Lincoln and Stephen
Douglas, the incumbent senator, were barnstorming through
Illinois. Douglas, the more famous politician, would speak in a
town, and the less-known Lincoln would follow immediately on his
heels, hoping that the crowds still excited by Douglas would
want to see his rival, too. Unhappy with the small size of his
audiences, Lincoln proposed that the two men appear on the same
stage. The newspapers mocked the idea, but Lincoln persisted,
and Douglas, to everyone’s surprise, agreed.

There is something attractive about the candidates
appearing on the same stage, allowing us to judge them side by
side, and Lincoln was no doubt hoping that he might look better
than the more experienced Douglas. Maybe he did. But though
Lincoln turned out to be an excellent debater and probably won
on points, it was Douglas who was elected to the Senate.

So why do we go through it, this silly, substance-free
exercise that changes few minds and reinforces the misguided
notion that political arguments are best resolved through
slogans and applause lines? One answer might be our love of
tradition: We’ve been doing it this way for a long time. It was
good enough for Kennedy and Nixon, and -- well, you get the
idea.

Competitive Urges

A better answer, however, is our love of competition. It is
competition of a particular kind -- the kind that can be reduced
to the size of a television screen and the length of a prime-
time special. Consider: On the night of the debate, and
endlessly the morning after, commentators said Romney had “won”
the debate, as though what tens of millions had turned in to
view what was in effect an award show.

I must confess that the notion leaves me at a loss. At its
best, debate might provide a forum for the candidates to
communicate their views, unmediated, to the voters. That doesn’t
make it a competition.

As a law professor, I use the Socratic method, calling on
students at random to answer questions. If one student gives a
good answer and another a poor one, I don’t assume -- I hope
nobody does! -- that the first student has won and the second
has lost. We’ve learned nothing about which will be the better
lawyer. Judging them isn’t the point of the pedagogy.

In his fascinating 2005 book “The Economy of Prestige,”
James F. English argues that the explosion of awards shows over
the past half-century reflects a cultural shift from awards as a
proxy for quality to awards as ends in themselves. Awards have
become important not for anything they tell us about the
underlying works, but because of the value of the shows
themselves as entertainment.

This seems a sufficient explanation for both the longevity
of and the attention paid to the pointless exercise of
presidential debates. They’re fun. Score is kept -- some
networks even keep a running tally of focus group responses as
the debate proceeds -- and of course many viewers have a rooting
interest. When President Barack Obama’s disappointed partisans
complain that their candidate didn’t go after his opponent
harder, they sound very much like spectators at a football game,
wanting to know how on earth the cornerback dropped a sure
interception.

English suggests that the surge in award shows is a
response to the growing sense that other sorts of valued honors
-- doctoral degrees, for example, or Pulitzer Prizes -- are
parceled out by an elite most of us will never join or even
influence. But in the U.S. today, he says, people like to feel
that their voices matter in just about everything. Thus we find
a proliferation of award shows where the audience can influence
the outcome.

Media Control

Perhaps this notion can teach us something about the future
of the presidential debates. Such value as they may possess may
never be unleashed until they become a reaction against a media
establishment that seeks to control not only the debates
themselves but also the audience’s reaction to them.

The economist Alex Tabarrok has proposed transforming the
debates into a game show -- “So You Think You Can Be President”
-- that would include segments such as this:

“Presidential candidates are provided with an economic
scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing,
liquidity is tight). Three experts propose plans. The candidate
must choose one of the plans. After the candidate chooses, the
true identities of the ‘experts’ are revealed. One is a trucker,
another a scuba diver instructor and the last a distinguished
economist. Which did the candidate choose?”

Maybe Tabarrok is on to something. If we want the
candidates to entertain us, we can surely design a format that
does exactly that -- while still showcasing the candidates’
mastery of skills actually needed in the Oval Office. Choosing
from competing ideas is certainly among them. Snappy one-liners
went out with vaudeville.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and his
most recent novel is “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.” The
opinion expressed are his own.)